Blizzard Removes Overwatch’s ‘Avoid This Player’ Feature

Sometimes you meet toxic players when playing multiplayer games. It is inevitable. Blizzard built in a feature called “Avoid this player” which basically during the matchmaking process, will ensure that players won’t be matched with that particular player, which we guess makes a lot of sense, at least until it starts to wreck havoc on the system.

This is why Blizzard has decided to remove the feature, and Overwatch’s game director Jeff Kaplan explains why in a forum post. In his post, Kaplan goes over how they have designed the matchmaking system, and what they take into consideration when trying to match players with each other such as their MMR and ping, for example.

However Kaplan notes, “For example, we recently realized that ‘Avoid this player’ was wreaking havoc on matchmaking. One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior).”

The end result is that when that player eventually got around to playing game, he was throw into a game with lesser-skilled players which meant that ultimately he did not get the experience that he was after. Of course Blizzard’s decision to disable the feature wasn’t just for one player; imagine a scenario where players start blocking other players that they feel intimidated by. Of course this also means that it leaves the door open to players having to play with the other toxic players that they wanted to avoid in the first place, but we guess that’s another problem for another time.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Blizzard, Overwatch